But, beside being based upon divine authority and example, this injunction of labor was formed upon a clear insight into and full appreciation of one of the most subtle elements of our constitution. It is this, that without labor no man can live; exist he may, but not live. This is one of the great mysteries of life--its greatest mystery; and its most emphatic lesson, which, if men would only learn, it would be one great step toward happiness, or at least toward that highest measure of happiness attainable below. If we can only realize this fact in the profundity of its truth, we shall have at once the key to half the miseries and anomalies which beset humanity. Passed upon man, in the first instance, by the Almighty as a curse, yet it carried in it the germ of a blessing; pronounced upon him as a sentence of punishment, yet there lurked in the chastisement the Father's love. Turn where we may, to the pages of bygone history or to the unwritten page of everyday life, from the gilded saloons of the noble to the hut of the peasant, we shall find this mysterious law working out its results with the unerring precision of a fundamental principle of nature. Where men obey that injunction of labor, no matter what their station, there is in the act the element of happiness, and wherever men avoid that injunction there is always the shadow of the unfulfilled curse darkening their path. This is the great clue to the balance of compensation between the rich and the poor. The rich man has no urgent need to labor; his wealth provides him with the means of escape from the injunction, and there is to be found in that man's life, unless he, in some way, with his head or with his hands, works out his measure of the universal task, a dissonance and a discord, a something which, in spite of all his wealth and all his luxury, corrupts and poisons his whole existence. It is a truth which cannot be ignored--no man who has studied life closely has failed to notice it, and no merely rich man lives who has not felt it and would not confess to its truth, if the question were pressed upon him. But in the case of the man who works, there is in his daily life the element of happiness, cares flee before him, and all the little caprices and longings of the imagination--those gad-flies which torment the idle--are to him unknown. He fulfils the measure of life; and whatever his condition, even if destitute in worldly wealth, we may be assured that the poor man has great compensations, and if he sat down with the rich man to count up grievances would check off a less number than his wealthier brother. Whatever his position, man should labor diligently; if poor he should labor and he may become rich, and if rich he should labor still, that all the evils attendant upon riches may disappear. Pure health steals over the body, the mind becomes dear, and the little miseries of life, the petty grievances, the fantastic wants, the morbid jealousies, the